Ryan Fedasiuk
The world exhaled when President Trump and Xi Jinping struck their tactical détente in South Korea in October, slashing tariffs, pausing restrictions on exports, and reopening diplomatic channels. For the sixth time in as many months, Washington and Beijing both claimed victory, markets rallied, and pundits lauded efforts to “stabilize” the relationship.
Yet no amount of diplomatic choreography can substitute for an answer to the most essential question: What does the United States want from China?
It is the defining question of 21st-century geopolitics. Every other alliance, market, and security calculus orbits around it. The Biden administration maintained that US-China competition “is simply not going to resolve in a neat and decisive end state.” Trump has offered no clearer answer, oscillating between provocation and accommodation as different factions within his administration temporarily seize the reins of American foreign policy.
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